There’s been some misconceptions and misinformation lately about FCoE. Like any technology, there are times when it makes sense and times when it doesn’t, but much of the anti-FCoE talk lately has been primarily ignorance and/or wilful misrepresentation.

In an effort to fight that ignorance, I put together a quick introduction to how FC and FCoE works. They both operate on the basic premise that you can’t drop any frames. Fibre Channel was built as a lossless protocol, and with a bit of work, Ethernet can also be lossless.

Interesting article (check it out). But the sad/amusing irony is that he’s wrong. How is he wrong? Here’s what Russ Fellows doesn’t know about storage:

1, 2, 4, and 8 Gbit Fibre Channel (as he points out) uses 8/10 bit encoding. That means about a 20% of the bandwidth available was lost due to encoding overhead (as Russ pointed out). That’s why 8 Gbit Fibre Channel only provides 800 MB/s of connectivity, even though 8,000 Megabits per second equates to 1,000 Megabytes per second (8000 Megabits / (8 bits per byte) = 1,000 Megabytes).

With this overhead in mind, Fibre Channel was designed to give 100 MB/s for every Gigabit of speed. It never increased the baud rate to make up for the overhead.

Ethernet, on the other hand, did increase the baud rate to make up for the overhead. Gigabit Ethernet uses the same 8/10 bit encoding, but they kicked the baud rate up to 1.25 gigabaud to make up the differences. As such, Gigabit Ethernet provides true 1 gigabit of throughput, or 125 Megabytes per second.

10 Gigabit Ethernet moved to 64/66 encoding, and kept to the approach of not letting the overhead impact throughput. 10 Gigabit Ethernet then provides 1250 Megabytes per second of throughput. The baud rate is 10.3125, giving true 10 Gigabit per second of data.

When Fibre Channel moved to the more efficient 64/66 bit encoding, rather than change the 100 MB/s per gigabit to 125 MB/s (which you get with all Ethernet speeds), they left the ratio (1 Gigabit to 100 MB/s) the same. Thus, every Gigabit = 100 MB/s, just like in previous speeds (1/2/4/8 FC). So while 16 Gbit Fibre Channel provides 1600 MB/s of throughput, the baud rate is actually only 14 gigabaud, and not true 16 Gbit. And don’t take my word for it, check out page 7 of Scott Shimomura‘s (of Brocade) presentation at the SPDE conference.

And that’s what Russ Fellows doesn’t know. His entire article is based on a false premise: Thinking that the move to 64/66 makes 16 Gbit pass more than twice as much traffic as 8 Gbit. But it’s not. He says that with 8 Gbit FC, 1+1 = 1.6 (when compared to 16 Gbit FC), which is factually incorrect for the reasons I’ve just explained. Yes, 64/66 bit encoding is more efficient. But they dropped the baud rate, negating the efficiency gains.

But since a bit of time has passed, I’ve had time to absorb Dave and J’s opinions, as well as others, I’ve come up with a list of the Top 5 Reasons by The Evaluator Group Screwed Up. This isn’t the complete list, of course, but some of the more glaring problems. Let’s start with #1:

Reason #1: I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

Their hilariously bad conclusion to the higher variance in response times and higher CPU usage was that it was the cause of the software initiators. Except, they didn’t use software initiators. The had actually configured hardware initiators, and didn’t know it. Let that sink in: They’re charged with performing an evaluation, without knowing what they’re doing.

The Cisco UCS VIC 1240 hardware CNA’s were utilized. Referring to them as software initiators caused some confusion. The Cisco VIC is a hardware initiator and we configured them with virtual HBAs. Evaluator Group has no knowledge of the internal architecture of the VIC or its driver. Our commentary of the possible cause for higher CPU utilization is our opinion and further analysis would be required to pinpoint the specific root cause.

Of course, it wasn’t the software initiator. They didn’t use a software initiator, but they were so clueless, they didn’t know they’d actually used a hardware initiator. Without knowing how they performed their tests (since they didn’t publish their methodology) it’s purely speculation, but it looks like the problem was caused by congestion (from them architecting the UCS solution incorrectly).

Reason #2: They’re Hilariously Bad At Math.

They claimed FCoE required 50% more cables, based on the fact that there were 50% more cables in the FCoE solution than the FC solution. Which makes sense… except that the FC system had zero Ethernet.

That’s right, in the HP/Fibre Channel solution, each blade had absolutely zero Ethernet connectivity. In the Cisco UCS solution, every blade had full Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity. None. Zilch. Why did they do that? Probably because had they included any network connectivity to the HP system, the cable count would have shifted to FCoE’s favor. Let me state this again, because it’s astonishingly stupid: They claimed FCoE (which included Ethernet and FC connectivity) required more cables without including any network connectivity for the HP/FC system.

Also, they made some power/cooling claims, despite the fact that the UCS solution didn’t require a separate FC switch (it’s capable of being a full-fledged Fibre Channel switch by itself), though the HP solution would have required a separate pair of Ethernet switches (which wasn’t included). So yeah, their math is a bit off. Had they done things, you know, correctly, the power, cooling, and cable count would have flipped in favor of FCoE.

Reason #3: UCS is Hard, You Guys!

They whinged about UCS being more difficult to setup. Anytime you’re dealing with unfamiliar technology, it’s natural that it’s going to be more difficult. However, they claimed that they had zero experience with HP as well (seriously, who at Brocade hired these guys?) How easy is UCS? Here is a video done from Amsterdam where a couple of Cisco techs added a new chassis and blade and had it booted up and running ESXi in less than 30 minutes from in the box to booted. Cisco UCS is different than other blade systems, but it’s also very easy (and very quick) to stand up. And keep in mind, the video I linked was done in Amsterdam, so they were probably baked.

For the past couple of years, VMware and NetApp have been doing performance tests on various storage protocols. Here’s one from a few years ago, which includes (native) 4 and 8 Gbit Fibre Channel, 10 Gbit FCoE, 10 Gbit iSCSI, and 10 Gbit NFS. The conclusion? The protocol doesn’t much matter. They all came out about the same when normalized for bandwidth. The big difference is in the storage backend. At least they published their methodology (I’m looking at you, Evaluator Group). Here’s one from Demartek that shows a mixture of storage protocols saturating 10 Gbit Ethernet. Again, the limitation is only the link speed itself, not the protocol. And again, again, Demartek published their methodology.

Reason #5: How Did They Set Everything Up? Magic!

Most of the time with these commissioned reports, the details of how it’s configured are given so that the results can be reproduced and audited. How did the Evaluator Group set up their environment?

As far as I can tell, magic. There’s several things they could have easily gotten wrong with the UCS setup, and given their mistake about software/hardware initiators, quite likely. They didn’t even mention which storage vendor they used.

So there you have it. A bit of a re-hash, but hey, it was a dumb report. The upside though is that it did provide me with some entertainment.

From Juniper to Cisco to VMware, companies are spouting up new SDN solutions. Juniper’s Contrail, Cisco’s ACI, VMware’s NSX, and more are all vying to be the next generation of data center networking. What is surprising, however, is what’s at the heart of these new technologies.

Is it VXLAN, NVGRE, Openflow? Nope. It’s Fibre Channel.

Seriously.

If you think about it, it makes sense. Fibre Channel has been doing fabrics since before we ever called Ethernet fabrics, well, fabrics. And this isn’t the first time that Fibre Channel has shown up in unusual places. There’s a version of Fibre Channel that runs inside certain airplanes, including jet fighters like the F-22.

Keep the skies safe from FCoE (sponsored by the Evaluator Group)

New generation of switches have been capable of Data Center Bridging (DCB), which enables Fibre Channel over Ethernet. These chips are also capable of doing native Fibre Channel So rather than build complicated VPLS fabrics or routed networks, various data center switching companies are leveraging the inherent Fibre Channel capabilities of the merchant silicon and building Fibre Channel-based underlay networks to support an IP-based overlay.

Buffer-to-buffer (B2B) credit system and losslessness of Fibre Channel, plus the new 32/128 Gigabit interfaces with the newest Fibre Channel standard are all being leveraged for these underlays. I find it surprising that so many companies are adopting this, you’d think it’d be just Brocade. But Cisco, Arista (who notoriously shunned FCoE) and Juniper are all on board with new or announced SDN offerings that are based mostly or in part on Fibre Channel.

However, most of the switches from various vendors are primarily Ethernet today, so the 10/40 Gigabit interfaces can run FCoE until more switches are available with native FC interfaces. Of course, these switches will still be required to have a number of native Ethernet ports in order to connect to border networks that aren’t part of the overlay network, so there will be still a need for Ethernet. But it seems the market has spoken, and they want Fibre Channel.

Networking-wise, I’ve spent my career in the data center. I’m pursuing the CCIE Data Center. I study virtualization, storage, and DC networking. Right now, the landscape in the network is constantly changing, as it has been for the past 15 years. However, with SDN, merchant silicon, overlay networks, and more, the rate of change in a data center network seems to be accelerating.

Things are changing fast in data center networking. You get the picture

Whenever you have a high rate of change, you’ll end up with a lot of questions such as:

Where does this leave the current equipment I’ve got now?

Would SDN solve any of the issues I’m having?

What the hell is SDN, anyway?

I’m buying vendor X, should I look into vendor Y?

What features should I be looking for in a data center networking device?

I’m not actually going to answer any of these questions in this article. I am, however, going to profile some of the common workloads that you find in data centers currently. Your data center may have one, a few, or all of these workloads. It may not have any of them. Your data center may have one of the workloads listed, but my description and/or requirements is way off. All certainly possible. These are generalizations, and with all generalizations your mileage may vary. With that disclaimer out of the way, strap in. Let’s go for a ride.

Traditional Virtualization

It’s interesting to say that something which only exploded into the data center in a big way in about 2008 as now being “traditional”, rather than “new-fangled”. But that’s the situation we have here. Traditional virtualization workload is centered primarily around VMware vSphere. There are other traditional virtualization products of course, such as Red Hat’s RHEV, Xen, and Microsoft Hyper-V, but VMware has the largest market share for this by far.

Buffer requirements aren’t typically super high. Bursting isn’t much of an issue for most workloads of this type.

Fibre Channel is often the storage protocol of choice, along with NFS and some iSCSI as well

Cisco has been especially successful in this realm with the Nexus line because of vPC, FabricPath, OTV and (to a much lesser extent) LISP, as they address some of the challenges with workload mobility (though not all of them, such as the speed of light). Arista, Juniper, and many others also compete in this particular realm, but Cisco is the market leader.

With the multi-pathing Layer 2 technologies such as SPB, TRILL, Cisco FabricPath, and Brocade VCS (the latter two are based on TRILL), you can build multi-spine leaf/spine networks/CLOS networks that you can’t with spanning-tree based networks, even with MLAG.

This type of network is what I typically see in data centers today. However, there is a shift towards Layer 3 networks and cloud workloads over traditional virtualization, so it will be interested to see how long traditional virtualization lasts.

VDI

VDI (Virtual Desktops) are a workload with the exact same requirements as traditional virtualization, with one main difference: The storage requirements are much, much higher.

Latency is not as important (most DC-grade switches would qualify), especially since latency is measured in milliseconds for remote desktop users

Layer 2 adjacencies are mandatory (required for vMotion)

Large Layer 2 domains

Converged infrastructures

Buffer requirements aren’t typically very high

High-end storage backends. All about the IOPs, y’all

For storage here, IOPs are the biggest concern. VDI eats IOPs like candy.

Legacy Workloads

This is the old, old school. And by old school, I mean late 90s, early 2000s. Before virtualization changed the landscape. There’s still quite a few crusty old servers, with uptimes measured in years, running long-abandoned applications. The problem is, these types of applications are usually running something mission critical and/or significant revenue generating. Organizations just haven’t found a way out of it yet. And hey, they’re working right now. Often running on proprietary Unix systems, they couldn’t or wouldn’t be migrated to a virtualized environment (where it would be much easier to deal with).

The hardware still works, so why change something that works? Because it would be tough to find more. It’s also probably out of vendor-supported service.

Latency? Who cares. Is it less than 1 second? Good enough.

Layer 2 adjacencies, if even required, are typically very small, typically just needed for the local clustering application (which is usually just stink-out-loud awful)

My own personal opinion is that this is the only place where Cisco Catalyst switches belong in a data center, and even then only because they’re already there. If you’re going with Cisco, I think everything else (and everything new) in the DC should be Nexus.

Cloud Workloads (Private Cloud)

If you look at a cloud workload, it looks very similar to the previous traditional virtualization workload. They both use VMs sitting on top of hypervisors. They both have underlying infrastructure of compute, network, and storage to support these VMs. The difference is primarily is in the operational model.

It’s often described as the difference between pets and cattle. With traditional virtualization, you have pets. You care what happens to these VMs. They have HA and DRS and other technologies to care for them. They’re given clever names, like Bart and Lisa, or Happy and Sleepy. With cloud VMs, they’re not given fun names. We don’t do vMotion/Live Migration with them. When we need them, they’re spun up. When they’re not, they’re destroyed. We don’t back them up, we don’t care if the host they reside on dies so long as there are other hosts carrying the workload. The workload is automatically sharded across the available hosts using logic in the application. Instead of backups, templates are used to create new VMs when the workload increases. And when the workload decreases, some of the VMs get destroyed. State is not kept on any single VM, instead the state of the application (and underlying database) is sharded to the available systems.

This is very different than traditional virtualization. Because the workload distribution is handled with the application, we don’t need to do vMotion and thus have Layer 2 adjacencies. This makes it much more flexible for the network architects to put together network to support this type of workload. Storage with this type of workload also tends to be IP-based (NFS, iSCSI) rather than FC-based (native Fibre Channel or FCoE).

With cloud-based workloads, there’s also a huge self-service component. VMs are spun-up and managed by developers or end-users, rather than the IT staff. There’s typically some type of portal that end-users can use to spin up/down resources. Chargebacks are also a component, so that even in a private cloud setting, there’s a resource cost associated and can be tracked.

OpenStack is a popular choice for these cloud workloads, as is Amazon and Windows Azure. The former is a private cloud, with the later two being public cloud.

Latency requirements are mostly the same as traditional virtualization

Because vMotion isn’t required, it’s all Layer 3, all the time

Storage is mostly IP-based, running on the same network infrastructure (not as much Fibre Channel)

Buffer requirements are typically the same as traditional virtualization

VXLAN/NVGRE burned into the chips for SDN/Overlays

You can use much cheaper switches for this type of network, since the advanced Layer 2 features (OTV, FabricPath, SPB/TRILL, VCS) aren’t needed. You can build a very simple Layer 3 mesh using inexpensive and lower power 10/40/100 Gbit ports.

However, features such as VXLAN/NVGRE encap/decap is increasingly important. The new Trident2 chips from Broadcom support this now, and several vendors, including Cisco, Juniper, and Arista all have switches based on this new SoC (switch-on-chip) from Broadcom.

High Frequency Trading

This is a very specialized market, and one that has very specialized requirements.

Latency is of the utmost concern. To the point of making sure ports are on the same ASIC. Latency is measured in nano-seconds, microseconds are an eternity

10 Gbit at the very least

Money is typically not a concern

Over-subscription is non-existent (again, money no concern)

Buffers are a trade off, they can increase latency but also prevent packet loss

This is a very niche market, one that Arista dominates. Cisco and a few other vendors have small inroads here, using the same merchant silicon that Arista uses, however Arista has had huge experience in this market. Every tick of the clock can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single trade, so companies have no problem throwing huge amounts of money at this issue to shave every last nanosecond off of latency.

Hadoop/Big Data

Latency is of high concern

Large buffers are critical

Over-subscription is low

Layer 2 adjacency is neither required nor desired

Layer 3 Leaf/spine networks

Storage is distributed, sharded over IP

Arista has also extremely successful in this market. They glue PC RAM onto their switch boards to provide huge buffers (around 760 MB) to each port, so it can absorb quite a bit of bursty traffic, which occurs a lot in these types of setups. That’s about .6 seconds of buffering a 10 Gbit link. Huge buffers will not prevent congestion, but they do help absorb situations where you might be overwhelmed for a short period of time.

Since nodes don’t need to be Layer 2 adjacent, simple Layer 3 ECMP networks can be created using inexpensive and basic switches. You don’t need features like FabricPath, TRILL, SPB, OTV. Just fast, inexpensive, low power ports. 10 Gigabit is the bare minimum for these networks, with 40 and 100 Gbit used for connectivity to the spines. Arista (especially with their 7500E platform) does very well in this area. Cisco is moving into this area with the Nexus 9000 line, which was announced late last year.

Conclusions

Understanding the requirements for the various workloads may help you determine the right switches for you. It’s interesting to see how quickly the market is changing. Perhaps 2 years ago, the large-Layer 2 networks seemed like the immediate future. Then all of a sudden Layer 3 mesh networks became popular again. Then you’ve got SDN like VMware’s NSX and Cisco’s ACI on top of that. Interesting times, man. Interesting times.

On my way back from South America/Antarctica, I was pointed to a bake-off/performance test commissioned by Brocade and performed by a company called Evaluator Group. It compared the performance of edge FCoE (non-multi-hop FCoE) to native 16 Gbit FC. The FCoE test was done on a Cisco UCS blade system connecting to a Brocade switch, and the FC was done on an HP C7000 chassis system connecting to the same switch. At first glance, it would seem to show that FC is superior to FCoE for a number of reasons.

I’m not a Cisco fanboy, but I am a Cisco UCS fanboy, so I took great interest in the report. (I also work for a Cisco Learning Partner as an instructor and courseware developer.) But I also like Brocade, and have a huge amount of respect for many of Brocade employees that I have met over the years. These are great and smart people, and they serve their customers well.

First, a little bit about these types of reports. They’re pretty standard in the industry, and they’re commissioned by one company to showcase superiority of a product or solution against one or more of their competitors. They can produce some interesting information, but most of the time it’s a case of: “Here’s our product in a best-case scenario versus other products in a mediocre-to-worst case scenario.” No company would release a test showing other products superior to theirs of course, so they’re only released when a particular company comes out on top, or (most likely) the parameters are changed until they do. As such, they’re typically taken with a grain of salt. In certain markets, such as the load balancer market, vendors will make it rain with these reports on a regular basis.

But for this particular report, I found several substantial issues with it which I’d like to share. It’s kind of a trainwreck. Let’s start with the biggest issue, one that is rather embarrassing.

What The Frak?

On page 17 check out the Evaluator Group comments:

“…This indicates the primary factor for higher CPU utilization within the FCoE test was due to using a software initiator, rather than a dedicated HBA. In general, software initiators require more server CPU cycles than do hardware initiators, often negating any cost advantages.”

For one, no shit. Hardware initiators will perform better than software initiators. However, the Cisco VIC 1240 card (which according to page 21 was included in the UCS blades) is a hardware initiator card. Being a CNA (converged network adaptor) the OS would see a native FC interface. With ESXi you don’t even need to install extra drivers, the FC interfaces just show up. Setting up a software FCoE initiator would actually be quite a bit more difficult to get going, which might account for why it took so long to configure UCS. Configuring a hardware vHBA in UCS is quite easy (it can be done in literally less than a minute).

Using software initiators against hardware FC interfaces is beyond a nit-pick in a performance test. It would be downright sabotage.

I asked the @Evalutor_Group account if they really did software initiators:

Question for @evaluator_group, did you use software FCoE initiators for the FC/FCoE test, and why?

Wow. First of all, software FCoE initiators is absolutely not standard configuration for UCS. In the three years I’ve been configuring and teaching UCS, I’ve never seen or even heard of FCoE software initiators being used, either in production or in a testing environment. The only reason you *might* want to do FCoE software initiators is when you’ve got the Intel mezzanine card (which is not a CNA, just an Ethernet card), and want to test FCoE. However, on page 21 it shows the UCS blades has having the VIC 1240 cards, not the Intel card.

Cisco UCS Storage Accelerator adapters are designed specifically for the Cisco UCS B-series M3 blade servers and integrate seamlessly to allow improvement in performance and relief of I/O bottlenecks.

Wait… I think they think that the VIC card is a software-only FCoE card. It appears they came to that conclusion because the VIC doesn’t specifically mention it’s a CNA in this particular document (other UCS documents clearly and correctly indicate that the VIC card is a CNA). Because it mentions the VICs separately from the traditional CNAs from Emulex and Qlogic, it seems they believe it not to be a CNA, and thus a software card.

So it may be they did use hardware initiators, and mistakenly called them software initiators. Or they actually did configure software initiators, and did a very unfair test.

No matter how you slice it, it’s troubling. On one hand, if they did configure software initiators, they either ignorantly or willfully sabotaged the FCoE results. If they just didn’t understand the basic VIC concept, it means they setup a test without understand the most basic aspects of the Cisco UCS system. We’re talking 101 level stuff, too. I suspect it’s the later, but since the only configuration of any of the devices they shared was a worthless screenshot of UCS manager, I can’t be sure.

This lack of understanding could have a significant impact on the results. For instance, on page 14 the response time starts to get worse for FCoE at about the 1200 MB/s mark. That’s roughly the max for a single 10 Gbit Ethernet FCoE link (1250 MB/s). While not definitive, it could mean that the traffic was going over only one of the links from the chassis to the Fabric Interconnect, or the traffic distribution was way off. My guess is they didn’t check the link utilization, or even know how, or how to fix it if it were off.

Conclusions First?

One of the more odd aspects of this report are where you found some of the conclusions, such as this one:

“Evaluator Group believes that Fibre Channel connectivity is required in order to achieve the full benefits that solid-state storage is able to provide.”

That was page 1. The first page of the report is a little weird to make a conclusion like that. Makes you sound a little… biased. These reports usually try to be impartial (despite being commissioned by a particular vendor). This one starts right out with an opinion.

Lack of Configuration

The amount of configuration they provide for the setup very sparse. For the UCS side, all they provide is one pretty worthless screenshot. Same for the HP system. For the UCS part, it would be important to know how they configured the vHBAs, and how they configured the two 10 Gbit links from the IOM to the chassis. Where they configured for the preferred Fabric Port Channel, or static pinning? So there’s no way to duplicate this test. That’s not very transparent.

Speaking of configuration, one of the issues they had with the FCoE side was how long it took them to stand up a UCS system. On page 11, second paragraph, they mention they need the help of a VAR to get everything configured. They even made a comment on page 10:

“…this approach was less intuitive during installation than other enterprise systems Evalutor Group has tested.”

So wow, you’ve got an environment that you’re unfamiliar with (we’ll see just how unfamiliar in a minute), and it took you *gasp* longer to configure? I’m a bit of an expert on Cisco UCS. I’m kind of a big deal. I have many paper-bound UCS books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany. I teach it regularly. And I’m not nearly as familiar with the C7000 system from HP, so I’d be willing to bet that it would take me longer to stand up an HP system than it would a Cisco UCS system. Anyone want in on that action?

Older Version? Update 2-6-2014: Screenshot Is A Fake

@JohnKohler noticed that on the screenshot on page 23 that the serial number in the screenshot is “1”, which means the screenshot is not from any physical instance of a UCS Manager, but the UCS Emulator. The date (if accurate on the host machine) shows June of 2010, so it’s a very, very old screenshot (probably of 1.3 or 1.4). So we have no idea what version of UCS they used for these tests (and more importantly, how they were configured).

@tbourke actually, that screenshot is from the emulator, was taken back in 2010. Look at the system time in bottom right, and the chassis SN

Based on the screenshot on page 23, the UCS version is 2.0. How can you tell? Take a look where it says “Unconfigured Ports”. As of 2.1, Cisco changed the way ports are shown in the GUI. 2.1 and later do not have a sub-menu for unconfigured ports. Only 2.0 and prior.

In version 2.1, there’s no “Unconfigured Ports” sub-menu.

From Page 21, you can see “Unconfigured Ports”, indicating it’s UCS 2.0 or earlier.

If the test was done in November 2013, that would put it one major revision behind, as 2.1 was released in November of 2012 (2.2 was released in Dec 2013). We don’t know where they got the equipment, but if it acquired anytime in the past year, it likely came with 2.1 already installed (but not definite). To get to 2.0, they’d have to downgrade. I’m not sure why they would have done that, and if they brought in a VAR with certified UCS people they would have likely recommended 2.1. With 2.1, they could have directly connected the storage array to the UCS fabric interconnects. UCS 2.1 can do Fibre Channel zoning, and can function as a standard Fibre Channel switch. The Brocade switch wouldn’t have been needed, and the links to the storage array would be 8 Gbit instead of 16 Gbit.

They also don’t mention the solid state array vendor, so we don’t know if there was capability to do FCoE directly to the storage array. Though not terribly common yet, FCoE connection to a storage array is done in production environments and would have benefited the UCS configuration if it were possible (and would be the preferred way if competing with 16 Gbit FC). There would have been the ability to do an LACP port channel between the Fabric Interconnects, providing better load distribution and redundancy.

Power Mad

The claim that the UCS system uses more power is laughable, especially since they specifically mentioned this setup is not how it would be deployed in production. Nothing about this setup was production worthy, and it wasn’t supposed to be. It’s fine for this type of test, but not for production. It’s non-HA, and using only 2 blades would be a waste of a blade system (and power, for either HP or Cisco). If you were only using a handful of servers, buying pizza boxes would be far more economical. Blades from either HP or Cisco only make sense past a certain number to justify the enclosures, networking, etc. If you want a good comparison, do 16 blades, or 40 blades, or 80 blades. Also include the Ethernet network connectivity. The UCS configuration has full Ethernet connectivity, the HP configuration as shown has squat.

Even by competitive report standards, this one is utter bunk. If I was Brocade, I would pull the report. With all the technology mistakes and ill-found conclusions, it’s embarrassing for them. It’s quite easy for Cisco to rip it to shreds.

(Just so there’s no confusion, no one paid me or asked me to write this. In fact, I’m still on PTO. I wrote this because someone is wrong on the Internet…)

In the networking world, you’ve no doubt heard the terms EtherChannel, port channel, LAG, MLAG, etc. These of course refer to taking multiple Ethernet connections and treating them as a single link. But one of the more confusing aspects I’ve run into is what’s the difference, if any, between the term EtherChannel and port channel? Well, I’m here to break it down for you.

OK, not that kind of break-it-down

First, let’s talk about what is vendor-neutral and what is Cisco trademark. EtherChannel is a Cisco trademarked term (I’m not sure if port channel is), while the vendor neutral term is LAG (Link Aggregation). Colloquially, however, I’ve seen both Cisco terms used with non-Cisco gear. For instance: “Let’s setup an Etherchannel between the Arista switch and the Juniper switch”. It’s kind of like in the UK using the term “hoovering” when the vacuum cleaner says Dyson on the side.

So what’s the difference between EtherChannel and port channel? That’s a good question. I used to think that EtherChannel was the name of the technology, and port channel was a single instance of that technology. But in researching the terms, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Both Etherchannel and port channel appear in early Cisco documentation, such as this CatOS configuration guide. (Remember configuring switches with the “set” command?) In that document, it seems that port channel was used as the name of the individual instance of Etherchannel, just as I had assumed.

So in the IOS world, it seems that EtherChannel is the technology, and port channel is the interface. In the Nexus world, port channel is used as the term for the technology and the individual interface, though sometimes EtherChannel is referenced.

It’s likely that port channel is preferred in the Nexus world because NX-OS is an offspring of SANOS, which Cisco initially developed for the MDS line of Fibre Channel switches. Bundling Fibre Channels ports on Cisco switches isn’t called EtherChannels, since those interfaces aren’t, well, Ethernet. The Fibre Channel bundling technology is instead called a SAN port channel. The command on a Nexus switch to look at a port cchannel is “show port-channel”, while on IOS switches its “show etherchannel”.

When a dual-homed technology was developed on the Nexus platform, it was called vPC (Virtual Port Channel) instead of VEC (Virtual EtherChannel).

Style Guide

Another interesting aspect to this discussion is that EtherChannel is capitalized as a proper noun, while port channel is not. In the IOS world, it’s EtherChannel, though when its even mentioned in the Nexus world, it’s sometimes Etherchannel, without the capital “C”. Port channel is written often as port channel or port-channel (the later is used almost exclusively in the NX-OS book).

So where does that leave the discussion? Well, I think in very general terms, if you’re talking about Cisco technology, Etherchannel, EtherChannel, port channel, port channel, and LAG are all acceptable term for the same concept. When discussing IOS, it’s probably more correct to use the term Etherchannel. When discussing NX-OS, port channel. But again, either way would work.